If you live in the eastern half of the United States, it’s possible that you, like me, are too sick to think about sex. Perhaps you clicked this bookmark out of sheer habit, from the deep recesses of a germy sickbed, and didn’t really want to be titillated. For you, I’ll begin with a couple of generalized bitches (“observations”) about life.

(1) Legislators all over America are mulling plans to regulate and tax marijuana. Just great. They finally get around to legalizing recreational drugs, and they start with the one that makes me all paranoid and antisocial. Why can’t the government ever regulate and tax a drug that I like? They could do mushrooms/peyote, which are just as healthy but give you fun hallucinations, or opium, which has that cool smell. The last time I got high on marijuana, all that happened was I became so fascinated by the movie Scrooged!, I barely noticed when all my friends went home to bed. I’m going to start a new political organization, called The Legalize Cocaine, Ecstasy and Adderall Abuse Party.

(2) Seriously, what is the effin’ deal with this illness? For those who have not experienced it up close, it’s a cold/flu with a dramatic cough. If you can imagine the domestic chaos that would ensue if the head of a family of ducks came home to find his wife making love with another duck, the resulting hellish cacophony is what it sounds like when I have to cough, every 12 seconds. It’s March! I was supposed to be rolling around nude in a verdant field! This was not the plan at all!

But enough of that; our story takes place way, way, way back, near the middle of our Winter of Discontent, on New Year’s Eve. “Chloe,” a recent college graduate, was going out to a big party with “Brad”; they’re friends, and she had agreed to act as a his wingwoman. Brad had been casually dating a young lady, and hoped this would be the night to seduce her. She would be attending the same party, and the idea was that “when she showed up, he was going to gracefully ditch me.”

Chloe was wearing a Betsey Johson dress, empire waisted, with turquoise stripes, black stockings with seams up the back (for “old-fashioned whorishness”), and black stilettos by Mossimo for Target.

(Picture of the dress coming soon!)

Back-seam stockings

Mossimo pumps

Brad came over before the party, and “we get kinda coked up.” They had bought some coke a couple of weeks before, in anticipation. They went the party, where everything went as expected. Brad’s lady friend showed up, and “they were pairing up as the night went on.”

A little while before midnight, he was like “Can I leave with her?” and Chloe was like “Dude, that was the plan.” He was wearing cowboy boots, jeans and a sable corduroy jacket. Chloe says he has “rugged good looks,” and would have gotten laid anyway.

Corduroy jacket

Cowboy boots

She decided it was time to leave the party and head to a certain bar (“The Liquor Box”) where some of her friends were. She hurried over there, arrived “literally three minutes” before the countdown to midnight, and proceeded to get “shitty drunk on free champagne.”

She was with her friends, feeling comfortable and happy. But “there’s this guy.” He was across the bar from her. “I’m making eyes at him, he’s making eyes at me.” A pale blondie, she loves “swarthy men,” and he was tall, dark and handsome (it turned out that he’s Iranian). She said to herself, “I want that dude.” Knowing what to say was not a problem because, according to her, “I’m not shy.” She introduced herself, and had a conversation in which she asked the following four questions:

— What’s your name? (“Alan”)
— What do you do? (He’s a business school student)
— Where do you live? (In town, near her)
— Do you want to go home with me? (Yes)

All the stars were aligned: “I wanted to have sex, he was there, he was hot.” Alan drove her to her house, unnerving her in the process by having the “cleanest car ever.” In the living room, they “pretended to have a conversation,” in interest of feigning decorum. But it didn’t last too long. After that, there was “lots of fuckin’,” with her on top because she “wanted to look at his perfect caramel skin.” She adds that “the sex was good, nothin’ to call your mama about.” Those were here exact words, but I think your mama does not want to hear about how you were ravished by a huge Arab, even (especially?) if it was mind-blowing. They fell into a deep sleep.

In the morning, she and Alan woke up around 10 and he drove her back to her car. She was “hung over as balls,” with a mouth tasting of “ashtray and cock,” and went back to bed immediately. When she woke up again around 5, she discovered he had left a Burberry Scarf and Kenneth Cole watch behind in his “mad dash to get out of my vagina.”

The tan one is ugly.

She considered selling these items on Craigslist, but her conscience got the better of her, and she managed to track him down on Facebook (they hadn’t traded contact information, or even last names). He came and got his accessories a few days later. Since then, they’ve seen each other out multiple times; each time, they have exchanged looks across the bar, as if to say “we shared a moment of deep personal intimacy, and now I want nothing to do with you.”

It’s also worth nothing that until shortly before this story begins, Chloe was in a relationship with a “fat science fiction fan,” and she says ever since then, the guys she’s slept with are getting hotter and hotter. She attributes this to a combination of confidence, alcohol, and the fact that “I am always willing.”

Holy Grails: We know so little about them. As regular readers will recall, we know that an HG is an article of clothing that consistently garners special, sexy attention for its wearer when she or he appears in public. We know that many people possess such items (although, Lord knows, not all of us), and we know that these auspicious garments have helped to get their wearers laid on multiple occasions. But where do Holy Grails come from? How do they work, and why do they work? Are the properties of the HG intrinsic to the object itself, or do they result from an increased sense of confidence on the part of the subject? A cynical person would probably claim that they’re like those “lucky socks” or whatever that athletes wear, and only work because they make you feel special; but literally no one really knows the answers to these question.

Look, people, here’s the truth: My methodology isn’t really very scientific. This clothes thing is a new field of endeavor, like biology was in the nineteenth century, and if I were a Victorian naturalist, I would get the information I needed by going into the field and recording thousands of specimens. I haven’t been doing that, because I don’t have the resources. I’m not a Charles Darwin or an Alfred Wallace, and I can’t be travelling to Peru or whatever, notebook in hand, hunting down obscure varietals of ass-flattering trousers. Instead I rely on people sending me e-mails that might provide key evidence.

It is lucky, then, that just when I was wondering about Holy Grails, I got this e-mail from “Agatha,” who wrote me on Christmas Eve. She prefaces her remarks by explaining that “I’m a little hung over… I’m about to endure my very large family for entirely too long and it’s still too early to start drinking again.”

Agatha is in her 20’s and lives in a small town (“Possum Flats”) in Delaware. She says that “I have these cowboy boots that were given to me by my now ex-fiancé.” He gave them as a birthday present because she “had been thinking about buying a pair, but my work situation was ridiculous and I couldn’t find the time to shoe shop.” She has since left the job, which “was sucking my soul dry,” and the man, who “turned out to be a giant ass.” But the boots remain. “It’s starting to occur to me that they are my holy grail. Any time I wear them out, it’s pretty much guaranteed that some man will look down, comment on them and then get this wistful far-off look for a moment. I couldn’t figure out the look until last week.”

Vintage Frye boots

On the night she’s referring to, Agatha went to a bar in Possum Flats to exchange Christmas gifts with a friend. She went out “wearing the first clean clothes I came by, a beige and brown striped thermal shirt from the Gap (big beige stripes, little brown stripes and it buttons a little), a pair of dark brown cords I’ve had for so long I don’t know where I bought them (these pants are great because my ass looks great in them, but they’re still really comfortable!), and of course, the boots.”

Gap brown cords

“It was a really weird night.” The two friends had met up with “really no interest in talking to anyone else, and it’s not my style to pick people up at bars. We ended up staying way longer than I thought we would. We somehow ended up talking to these three guys at the other side of the bar. The bartender called last call around 12:30, at which point, one of the guys asked what our plans were for the rest of the evening. {Editor’s note: I hate it when bars close this early! We’d never put up with that in my town!}”

They “conferred with each other and decided we could still drink and not be scumbags the next day at work. Leaving with the new guy friends, I hung back a little with the one I’d been flirting with (kinda looks like the guy from the Verizon commercials, but in a cute way) and in the hallway of the bar, we start making out. Big lower lip. Yummy. Out on the sidewalk, all of us freezing, we’re trying to decide where to go. Their place was around the corner, so we walk the three blocks or so laughing drunkenly.”

Verizon man

The scene at “this random house” was as follows: “We’re all sitting around drinking beer and eating cookies. The computer was on playing music from some sort of internet radio thing. I forget what the song was… it was Neil Young. Horizon Moon?? Blue Horizon?? something like that, when all three guys jump up off the couch and take their pants off. They just started dancing around in their boxers. Said something about whenever that song came on, you dance in your undies. We didn’t buy it. There was a cat walking around the apartment that at one point started sucking on my arm. That was weird… there was dancing involved too. Fully dressed though.”

After this night of cat-sucking and erotic dance, who wouldn’t be in the mood for love? Agatha was, it seemed, because “I kinda made the first move. Again… it was weird. I felt like someone else! Me and this guy were sitting on the couch and everyone else was outside smoking. I stood up, grabbed his hand and walked him down the hallway to his room. Pretty clear intentions.”

She adds that she and “‘can you hear me now?’ guy” have been texting, and might see each other again. But the part of the story that’s most important for science is that while they were hooking up, “he asked if I would leave the boots on. (My ah-ha moment with the boots! That’s the look!! Why it took me this long to figure out, is completely beyond me.)” So that’s that. Holy Grails work because they make people picture you fucking them while still wearing them! I like this theory; it could be true, and it has a certain elegant simplicity.

EPILOGUE: “Me and the friend from the bar having been trying to figure out this boot stuff since. She was talking to one of her bosses about the whole thing the next day (Wow, you look really tired… good night?? haha!!… apparently we were out late enough to be scumbags at work the next day). I have never met her boss. I don’t know his name, never seen him, couldn’t point him out if I had to… My friend, saying something about the boots, laughed when her boss got a far-off wistful look and asked what color they were!”

Sorry for the sporadic posting lately. I can tell you for a fact that people are still out there getting laid, even though I have been preoccupied. I know this because I was out with some friends the other night and I observed the process of seduction in action. A young lady who’s a regular reader came up to my table and kept excitedly slurring at me about how “I’m gonna fuck this guy!” He was trailing around after her, and I think this made him slightly nervous. She pointed out her outfit (a pair of corduroy pants and a black t-shirt with some innocuous logo), saying “these are the clothes that get you laid,” and I was like “we’ll see about that.” If I had followed them home, I could have “liveblogged” the whole thing.

Marc Jacobs corduroy pants

He was wearing a plaid cowboy-style shirt and one of those caps that dudes wear. It was olive green.

Military-style cap

Plaid cowboy shirt

I will have new updates shortly, but in the meantime, I’m happy to announce my HALLOWEEN COSTUME STORY CONTEST. I would like to do a bunch of holiday-themed entries to get everyone in a party mood; I’d also like to test the often-repeated claim that Halloween is the sexiest holiday . The rules are simple: If you can remember a time you got laid that involved costumes (Halloween, but I’d also accept Mardi Gras, fancy dress balls, and so on), write how it all happened and e-mail it to me. I will post all the good ones, and then unveil the winner on or around Halloween itself.

I am not sure what the reward will be for victory in this contest, other than the knowledge of a job well done. At the moment I have very little to offer the world except for “cultural capital,” a nebulous asset that isn’t nearly as reassuring to possess as regular old money capital; in fact, I considered holding an ancillary contest in which people offered suggestions about what the prize for the first contest should be. This threatened to lead to a mise-en-abîme of infinitely recursive contests, so I don’t think I will, after all.

Instead, if your company or business would like to donate an item to be used as the prize for our HALLOWEEN COSTUME STORY CONTEST, it (the company/business) will receive promotional consideration from The Clothes That Got Me Laid. Don’t miss this great opportunity! Who will step up to the challenge?

Today, the second in a II-part series. When we last encountered Cecily, she was “scurrying away” from the scene of her tryst with her ex-boyfriend/boss. Shortly thereafter, workplace relations between the two became very strained. The fact that he refused to do the friends-after-the-breakup thing contributed to this problem. If you’re someone’s boss, and you’re fucking them, it’s just not practical to claim you hate them too much to be friends. The result was that she quit that job and went to work at a different ski resort.

Cecily volunteers for a charity that raises money for disabled people; a few weeks after she started her new job, they held a beerfest at a casino in Tahoe to raise money for the Special Olympics. She offered to help set up. Actually, the charity offered to let her help set up; when she had volunteered at the beerfest the previous year, her task was pouring beer, and “I poured it all into my own mouth.” Instead of telling her they didn’t want her near their beer ever again, the powers that be called her and said “do you want to help set up?” As it turns out, this was a better gig, because she got done early and was free to “get liquored up” the rest of the night.

Cecily had met “Finn” working at her last ski resort, I think. (I can’t keep track of all the ski resorts involved in this anecdote! Cecily is an experienced woman with a lot of ski resorts in her past, and I doubt even she can remember them all.) At the time, they had been dating other people, but now it seemed they were both single. She ran into him, they got talking, and he asked if she wanted to go across the street to a concert. It featured the guy who played harmonica for Blues Traveler. Once she had spent enough time getting drunk, she agreed to this plan.

She was wearing camel-colored corduroy pants and a blue-green cotton shirt with short sleeves. She describes them as normal casual wear, and says that “they were decent except for having beer spilled all over them.” Also, she had on strappy leather sandals that were “filled with beer.” By the way, I wish everybody would stop getting on my case about how the clothes on this site aren’t very seductive and how it’s “actually the booze” that gets people laid and whatever. I don’t care! This site is for entertainment purposes! You’re supposed to draw your own conclusions. Anyway, in this case Cecily was wearing both clothes and booze, so there you go.

Before leaving the concert, Cecily and Finn exchanged phone numbers. He was very anxious that, in her alcohol-induced haze, she would fail to register his identity (“do you even remember what my name is?”), or be unable to operate her phone, so he made sure she entered it correctly.

Such enthusiasm seemed to imply he would call right away. So why didn’t he? Was he “just not that into her?” Actually, he had a good reason. He had lent his phone to his friend “Ash,” who took it to a party where a fight broke out. During the melee, someone broke a bottle over Ash’s head, and he had to go to the hospital; he lost the phone in all the confusion. (Shortly afterward, he got sent to jail for having too many DUIs. Cecily says things like this are always happening to him. I told her I need a CTGML story from this loveable rogue, and she said she would try to hook me up.)

Finn finally got his phone back, after Ash returned to the scene of the crime and dug it out of the cushions of some girl’s sofa. He did this because he’s a loyal friend, and because Finn “threatened to kill him” if the phone wasn’t recovered. Meanwhile, a week had passed. Cecily was out drinking with friends one night, and decided to call Finn. She didn’t think he was that interested, but they were his friends too, so inviting him to join them didn’t seem too high-pressure.

Instead, he said “I would like to take you on a date.” They went on their date a few days later. She wore dark jeans and a black baby-doll blouse. He wanted to take her to a nice Spanish restaurant, but it was closed for renovations, so they wandered all over town looking for something else, finally settling on a dive-y Mexican place. After their meal they went to her place and hooked up. Her roommate at the time had a crush on her, and was unreasonably annoyed that she had done this, but you can’t stand in the way of true love! Cecily and Finn remain a happy couple to this day.

Today I’m presenting a grab bag of outfits and anecdotes that I couldn’t quite make into full-fledged entries. Sometimes I get a hot tip on a CTGML, but I can’t gather all the information I need for a coherent narrative. For example:

— An old college friend told me she had been having “a torrid, unconsummated affair with a married man,” and that she would e-mail me the details of how it finally got consummated. This promised to be our most sensational entry ever! Of course she never got around to it, and then she avoided me when I tried to harass her on Facebook chat. What’s up with that?

— Yet another D.C. resident, “Phoebe,” told me about a guy who picked her up at The Fox & Hounds who was really into her gray corduroy pants. I don’t know any of the details of this, including who the guy was and what he said to her, because I wrote them down on a scrap of old newspaper, then immediately lost it. Apparently, he made some remark to the effect that he loved corduroy because it reminded him of his youth in the 70’s, a time when he was first starting to notice girls and get in touch with his sexuality. It’s unclear whether this person is just an outlier, or if he’s representative of a whole generation of corduroy-loving males. In case anyone’s interested, the guy was about 35 when Phoebe encountered him 5 years ago, so this (possibly fictive) cohort would now be around 40. However, I think you could adapt the same idea to any age group — just figure out what styles were ubiquitious when your target was 12, then wear some version of that. (Although even this principle may not be correct; there seems to be something about corduroy that makes it so people who like it are just fanatical about it. It’s like the Kevin Smith of textiles.)

— Last night I was at a bar with some friends, and we got talking to this guy who said he had gotten laid twice in two weeks while wearing the same Jack Daniel’s t-shirt. This seemed promising, so I asked to hear more. “Todd Pretzel,” as my notes strangely identify him, is a tile-layer from Boston who was approached by an Italian woman while doing something-or-other in Beverly Hills. I never really got the full story — he was oddly reticent, and disposed to skip over things that seemed important. I also missed some of what he did say, because I’m very bad at hearing over background noise. It’s a hereditary trait. I asked him to speak up but he wouldn’t, prompting me to wail disconsolately “I’m hearing-impaired!” Maybe he just didn’t want to be overheard by Evadne, Bjorn, and Bjorn’s girlfriend, who were sitting right there, but I didn’t think of this at the time.

Finally, though, it came clear why he was being so weird about the story: It wasn’t just him who fucked the Italian woman, but his guy friend too, at the same time. One of them fucked her from behind while she sucked the other one’s dick. Bjorn says this maneuver is called a “pig roast.” T. Pretzel seemed very uncomfortable about having done this and said everyone involved was motivated by “desperation.” I took a bunch of notes on a napkin, but not only are they incomplete, they are written in a ludicrously near-incomprehensible scrawl. Phrases emerge from the chaos such as “JD & coke,” “shots,” “just drinkin’,” “walked —> bar,” “smack,” “nudist,” “itwasraunchy,” and “I do tile.” If you are a straight guy, and you and your friend teamed up on a woman, please don’t get all angsty; it doesn’t necessarily make you gay.

Finally, an ensemble you will never see in the pages of Lucky Magazine: “My Foolproof 70’s Pig-Roast Outfit (for Fall).”